Pub Date : 2016-10-01DOI: 10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim010210039
A. Hama
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{"title":"Einstein: His Life and Universe","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-0247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-0247","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73710477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End Atul Gawande Metropolitan Books, 2014Atul Gawande's three earlier best-selling books1 have offered an incisive critique of medical practice in the United States, applying statistics and commonsense organizational theory to the delivery of medical services. They interest readers precisely because such practicalities bear so directly on everyone's well-being. With Being Mortal, Gawande has taken on an issue that is simultaneously broader and yet more specific: how the medical community and American society deal, and potentially can deal better, with the complicated processes of aging and dying. Since it is a truism that "we all die," there are few if any subjects that touch us so intimately.Gawande's record gives reason to perk up and pay attention. He is both an accomplished doctor and a clear and intelligent writer. He is a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a professor at the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, a director of a center for health systems innovation, and chairman of an NGO working to improve surgery worldwide. His energy must be prodigious, since amidst all this he is able to write prolifically as a staffwriter for The New Yorker and most preeminently as the author of his four books.The speakers at the recent "White Coat Ceremony" for first-year students at the University of Massachusetts Medical School focused on one theme: the importance of kindness in medical practice. One way of seeing Being Mortal is that Gawande explores just how kindness can best be brought to bear on aging and dying, not just by the medical profession but by American culture at large. As we will see, this is not an easy sub- ject. There are many difficult intersections between "doing everything conceivable to keep a patient alive," which is the medical profession's historic ethic and perceived task, and making the end of life a fulfilling, self-actualizing experience. Kindness in the abstract may be the aspiration but the abstraction doesn't tell us much about how the trade-offs are best handled. It is no wonder Gawande, though feeling strongly, foreswears dogmatism: "I have found it unclear what the answers should be, or even whether any adequate ones are possible." As readers come to realize how open the subjects of aging and dying are, they find that Being Mortal is a book of provocative consciousness-raising, not a manual of final answers.Gawande discusses the variety of ways the experience of aging and dying have been softened in the United States, but an understanding of the book requires us first to see how he perceives the mixed humanity and inhumanity of hard-charging medical treatment. When he tells us that "people are living longer and better than at any other time in history" and that there has arguably been "no better time in history to be old," he acknowledges a fact that deserves a prominent place in any discussion of the subject. As recently as 196
{"title":"Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.189307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.189307","url":null,"abstract":"Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End Atul Gawande Metropolitan Books, 2014Atul Gawande's three earlier best-selling books1 have offered an incisive critique of medical practice in the United States, applying statistics and commonsense organizational theory to the delivery of medical services. They interest readers precisely because such practicalities bear so directly on everyone's well-being. With Being Mortal, Gawande has taken on an issue that is simultaneously broader and yet more specific: how the medical community and American society deal, and potentially can deal better, with the complicated processes of aging and dying. Since it is a truism that \"we all die,\" there are few if any subjects that touch us so intimately.Gawande's record gives reason to perk up and pay attention. He is both an accomplished doctor and a clear and intelligent writer. He is a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a professor at the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, a director of a center for health systems innovation, and chairman of an NGO working to improve surgery worldwide. His energy must be prodigious, since amidst all this he is able to write prolifically as a staffwriter for The New Yorker and most preeminently as the author of his four books.The speakers at the recent \"White Coat Ceremony\" for first-year students at the University of Massachusetts Medical School focused on one theme: the importance of kindness in medical practice. One way of seeing Being Mortal is that Gawande explores just how kindness can best be brought to bear on aging and dying, not just by the medical profession but by American culture at large. As we will see, this is not an easy sub- ject. There are many difficult intersections between \"doing everything conceivable to keep a patient alive,\" which is the medical profession's historic ethic and perceived task, and making the end of life a fulfilling, self-actualizing experience. Kindness in the abstract may be the aspiration but the abstraction doesn't tell us much about how the trade-offs are best handled. It is no wonder Gawande, though feeling strongly, foreswears dogmatism: \"I have found it unclear what the answers should be, or even whether any adequate ones are possible.\" As readers come to realize how open the subjects of aging and dying are, they find that Being Mortal is a book of provocative consciousness-raising, not a manual of final answers.Gawande discusses the variety of ways the experience of aging and dying have been softened in the United States, but an understanding of the book requires us first to see how he perceives the mixed humanity and inhumanity of hard-charging medical treatment. When he tells us that \"people are living longer and better than at any other time in history\" and that there has arguably been \"no better time in history to be old,\" he acknowledges a fact that deserves a prominent place in any discussion of the subject. As recently as 196","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73314132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence Bryan Burrough Penguin Press, 2015Bryan Burrough's book is especially pertinent now, as public officials and terrorism experts warn that the U.S. faces the "highest threat level" at any time in U.S. history. According to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the "radicalization" of young people via the Internet, and their recruitment into Islamic terrorist groups, constitutes a major security concern. The post-9/11 realities of an unsecured border coupled with the inability to track foreign nationals once they enter the U.S. seem to be noticed by some officials, but little is being done to rectify these problems. Several key recommendations from the 9/11 Commission, now more than ten years old, remain unimplemented to this day.The present focus is largely on foreign terrorists who get into the country and unleash deadly violence on Americans, such as the 19 Middle Easterners who carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and the Chechen-born brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose bombs at the Boston Marathon killed three people and injured another 264 on April 15, 2013. But what about the threat from American citizens, either immigrants who are resident aliens or naturalized citizens, or perhaps the second generation of naturalized citizens, who are U.S.-born, and are committed to revolutionary causes, seek to kill en masse U.S. citizens, and plot violent acts of terrorism?As Burrough shows, the threat of domestic terrorism is nothing new. The U.S. has experienced waves of terrorist acts in the past from bomb-wielding revolutionaries, anarchists, black militants, and sordid radical ideologues. Burrough chronicles a not-too-distant decade of violent mayhem in Days of Rage.The author describes a long-forgotten period that in some ways parallels the present-day concerns over terrorism and public safety that American citizens and officials must now confront. The big difference is that many of those who plotted and carried out numerous terrorist bombings two generations ago escaped prosecution, or received minimal prison sentences, and reemerged over the years to become teachers and professors who now lead relatively successful lives. In some cases these former underground fugitives remain unapologetic about their unlawful militant past, but have assimilated anonymously back into society.Burrough tells the sordid tale of this bygone era in a lively, engagingly descriptive account in the context of the times, but also with an eye on contemporary developments. Early in his book, the author revisits one terrorist plot that went fatally awry.Shortly before noon on Friday, March 6, 1970, an explosion destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse in New York City. After sorting through the smoldering debris, rescue workers discovered the partial remains of three bodies, which included a severed head. Initially the explosion seemed to be a telltal
《愤怒的日子:美国的激进地下组织、联邦调查局和被遗忘的革命暴力时代》布莱恩·伯勒《愤怒的日子:美国的激进地下组织、联邦调查局和被遗忘的革命暴力时代》布莱恩·伯勒的这本书现在显得尤为重要，因为政府官员和恐怖主义专家警告说，美国面临着美国历史上任何时候都没有过的“最高威胁级别”。加利福尼亚州共和党众议员德文·努内斯(Devin Nunes)表示，年轻人通过互联网“激进化”，并被伊斯兰恐怖组织招募，构成了一个主要的安全问题。一些官员似乎注意到了9/11后的现实，即边境不安全，加上外国人进入美国后无法追踪，但几乎没有采取任何措施来纠正这些问题。9/11调查委员会提出的几项重要建议至今仍未得到实施，这些建议至今已有十多年的历史。目前的重点主要是那些进入美国并对美国人发动致命暴力的外国恐怖分子，比如对世贸中心和五角大楼发动袭击的19名中东人，以及出生于车臣的焦哈尔和塔梅尔兰萨纳耶夫(Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev)兄弟，他们在2013年4月15日的波士顿马拉松赛上制造的炸弹造成3人死亡，264人受伤。但是，来自美国公民的威胁又如何呢?这些美国公民可能是作为永久外国人的移民，也可能是归化公民，或者是在美国出生的第二代归化公民，他们致力于革命事业，试图大规模杀害美国公民，并策划暴力恐怖主义行为。正如伯勒所说，国内恐怖主义的威胁并不是什么新鲜事。过去，美国经历了一波又一波的恐怖主义行为，其中包括持炸弹的革命者、无政府主义者、黑人武装分子、肮脏的激进理论家。伯勒在《愤怒的日子》中记录了不太遥远的十年暴力混乱。作者描述了一个被遗忘已久的时期，在某些方面与当今美国公民和官员必须面对的对恐怖主义和公共安全的担忧相似。最大的不同是，在两代人之前，许多策划和实施了大量恐怖爆炸事件的人逃脱了起诉，或者得到了最低限度的监禁，多年来，他们重新出现，成为教师和教授，现在过着相对成功的生活。在某些情况下，这些前地下逃亡者对他们的非法武装过去仍然没有道歉，但已经匿名地融入了社会。伯勒在时代背景下生动、引人入胜地描述了这个过去时代的肮脏故事，同时也关注了当代的发展。在书的开头，作者回顾了一次恐怖分子的致命阴谋。1970年3月6日，星期五，快到中午的时候，一场爆炸摧毁了纽约市格林尼治村的一栋联排别墅。在对闷烧的残骸进行分类后，救援人员发现了三具尸体的部分残骸，其中包括一颗被砍下的头颅。起初，爆炸似乎是煤气泄漏引起的剧烈爆炸的迹象，但调查人员很快发现了爆炸的根源——地下室里的炸弹制造材料足以夷平整个街区。“地下气象”是民主社会学生组织(SDS)的一个暴力派别，该组织的五名成员计划在当晚晚些时候在新泽西州迪克斯堡陆军基地举行的军官舞会上使用装满炸药、钉满钉子的管状炸弹。然而，其中一枚炸弹过早引爆，炸死了“地下气象”纽约分部的三名成员。这次爆炸夺去了向美国宣战的激进革命者的生命。20世纪70年代，国内恐怖主义爆炸活动广泛开展。在1971年和1972年的18个月期间，美国发生了2500起爆炸事件，几乎每天5起。袭击的目标通常是联邦设施、军事基地、法官、政府大楼和包括五角大楼和U. ...在内的各种国家地标
{"title":"Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence","authors":"K. Lamb","doi":"10.5860/choice.192201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.192201","url":null,"abstract":"Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence Bryan Burrough Penguin Press, 2015Bryan Burrough's book is especially pertinent now, as public officials and terrorism experts warn that the U.S. faces the \"highest threat level\" at any time in U.S. history. According to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the \"radicalization\" of young people via the Internet, and their recruitment into Islamic terrorist groups, constitutes a major security concern. The post-9/11 realities of an unsecured border coupled with the inability to track foreign nationals once they enter the U.S. seem to be noticed by some officials, but little is being done to rectify these problems. Several key recommendations from the 9/11 Commission, now more than ten years old, remain unimplemented to this day.The present focus is largely on foreign terrorists who get into the country and unleash deadly violence on Americans, such as the 19 Middle Easterners who carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and the Chechen-born brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose bombs at the Boston Marathon killed three people and injured another 264 on April 15, 2013. But what about the threat from American citizens, either immigrants who are resident aliens or naturalized citizens, or perhaps the second generation of naturalized citizens, who are U.S.-born, and are committed to revolutionary causes, seek to kill en masse U.S. citizens, and plot violent acts of terrorism?As Burrough shows, the threat of domestic terrorism is nothing new. The U.S. has experienced waves of terrorist acts in the past from bomb-wielding revolutionaries, anarchists, black militants, and sordid radical ideologues. Burrough chronicles a not-too-distant decade of violent mayhem in Days of Rage.The author describes a long-forgotten period that in some ways parallels the present-day concerns over terrorism and public safety that American citizens and officials must now confront. The big difference is that many of those who plotted and carried out numerous terrorist bombings two generations ago escaped prosecution, or received minimal prison sentences, and reemerged over the years to become teachers and professors who now lead relatively successful lives. In some cases these former underground fugitives remain unapologetic about their unlawful militant past, but have assimilated anonymously back into society.Burrough tells the sordid tale of this bygone era in a lively, engagingly descriptive account in the context of the times, but also with an eye on contemporary developments. Early in his book, the author revisits one terrorist plot that went fatally awry.Shortly before noon on Friday, March 6, 1970, an explosion destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse in New York City. After sorting through the smoldering debris, rescue workers discovered the partial remains of three bodies, which included a severed head. Initially the explosion seemed to be a telltal","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81885045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Specter of Capital Joseph Vogl (translators Joachim Redner and Robert Savage) Stanford University Press, 2015Various conceptions of innate order have been central to the evolving worldviews that have provided a coherent mental architecture during the successive epochs in the history of the West. In The Specter of Capital, Joseph Vogl traces the development, and continuing evolution, of one of these conceptions in particular - the idea that a market economy is an orderly and just system. He takes the reader back through a number of facets of modern thought, such as the influence of the Newtonian system of natural order on the view developed by Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith and others that individuals' pursuit of their self-interest would produce, instead of dog-eat-dog chaos, a self-regulating, productive and morally justified social and economic order.The Specter of Capital examines the idea of an orderly market system in intelligent, although not exhaustive, detail, and then proceeds to "deconstruct" it, arguing that the coherence isn't really there. "The world has become unreadable... Things in general are running out of control." Vogl has written a postmodernist critique, with deconstruction as his main theme.Accordingly, a reader will find the book to have varied dimensions. Depending upon the reader, these will seem valuable, instructive and intriguing; or, on the contrary, nihilistic and pretentious. Let's look at them one at a time:With regard to the intellectual history, Vogl's book provides an excellent summary, but to say this is not to say that his account supplies (or perhaps is intended to supply) anything original. A good history of economic thought will give the same review of the thinking behind classical and neo-classical economics, and will supply considerably more detail than Vogl has aspired to. It would have to be a history that is quite up to date, however, since Vogl is especially good in his description of the most recent economic thinking and market behavior that led to the world's recent financial crisis. A number of recent books about the crisis are also very good on those subjects.There will be several things to say about his deconstructionist theme that the market is not really a finely jeweled mechanism producing order and justice. It will be helpful, however, to hold our discussion of those until we have noted the book's stylistic dimension. The esoterica that marks Vogl's postmodernism will turn away a good many readers, and not without justification. It will appeal, though, to the type of mind that revels in the abstruse. There should hopefully be readers, too, who will read The Specter of Capital out of curiosity, hoping to sample the experience of diving into the sort of writing done in recent decades by the super-sophisticates of the intellectual world. Such folks are numerous, and it's good to be aware of them.The entry for "postmodernism" in UrbanDictionary.com gives an audaciously irreverent and sarcast
{"title":"The Specter of Capital","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.188686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.188686","url":null,"abstract":"The Specter of Capital Joseph Vogl (translators Joachim Redner and Robert Savage) Stanford University Press, 2015Various conceptions of innate order have been central to the evolving worldviews that have provided a coherent mental architecture during the successive epochs in the history of the West. In The Specter of Capital, Joseph Vogl traces the development, and continuing evolution, of one of these conceptions in particular - the idea that a market economy is an orderly and just system. He takes the reader back through a number of facets of modern thought, such as the influence of the Newtonian system of natural order on the view developed by Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith and others that individuals' pursuit of their self-interest would produce, instead of dog-eat-dog chaos, a self-regulating, productive and morally justified social and economic order.The Specter of Capital examines the idea of an orderly market system in intelligent, although not exhaustive, detail, and then proceeds to \"deconstruct\" it, arguing that the coherence isn't really there. \"The world has become unreadable... Things in general are running out of control.\" Vogl has written a postmodernist critique, with deconstruction as his main theme.Accordingly, a reader will find the book to have varied dimensions. Depending upon the reader, these will seem valuable, instructive and intriguing; or, on the contrary, nihilistic and pretentious. Let's look at them one at a time:With regard to the intellectual history, Vogl's book provides an excellent summary, but to say this is not to say that his account supplies (or perhaps is intended to supply) anything original. A good history of economic thought will give the same review of the thinking behind classical and neo-classical economics, and will supply considerably more detail than Vogl has aspired to. It would have to be a history that is quite up to date, however, since Vogl is especially good in his description of the most recent economic thinking and market behavior that led to the world's recent financial crisis. A number of recent books about the crisis are also very good on those subjects.There will be several things to say about his deconstructionist theme that the market is not really a finely jeweled mechanism producing order and justice. It will be helpful, however, to hold our discussion of those until we have noted the book's stylistic dimension. The esoterica that marks Vogl's postmodernism will turn away a good many readers, and not without justification. It will appeal, though, to the type of mind that revels in the abstruse. There should hopefully be readers, too, who will read The Specter of Capital out of curiosity, hoping to sample the experience of diving into the sort of writing done in recent decades by the super-sophisticates of the intellectual world. Such folks are numerous, and it's good to be aware of them.The entry for \"postmodernism\" in UrbanDictionary.com gives an audaciously irreverent and sarcast","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90658641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How China Became Capitalist Ronald Coase and Ning Wang Palgrave Macmillan, 2013China's transition from Maoism to "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" is not only one of the principal facts about the global economy today, but is also a subject of great complexity and ambiguity. What is one to make of a society in which Adam Smith is revered while Marxism is still universally taught in the schools? In How China Became Capitalist, Ronald Coase, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, and Ning Wang, an assistant professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University, have joined in writing an extended essay on the history and economics of China since the Communists completed their victory over Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. It is clear from the book's title that they believe China has "become capitalist," but it is apparent that there is much that is muddled about the transformation. There are many contradictory elements that go together to cook up a social and economic stew that is likely to bubble vigorously for quite a while before it develops any culinary coherence.The subject is of such importance that there is compelling reason for serious minds to read this book attentively. It is full of information new to any reader who isn't a China specialist. At the same time, it is for several reasons hard to recommend it to the general reader. It isn't difficult reading or full of technical information, but neither is it particularly engaging, as one might require of a "good read." Even though the chapter titles suggest a chronological account, there is throughout the book a rather jumbled mixture of time elements, with much rehashing, as though the chapters were done as separate essays independently needing to cover and recover the same ground. The result is not an ordered chronology. We are reminded of Eric Hoffer's observation that many books' content could just as well be stated in a single article, attaining greater concision and clarity. More substantively, a telling criticism is that there is much that Coase and Wang don't explain or even inquire into, leaving many unanswered questions. We will have more to say about that later.Through most of the country's history before the Communist take-over in 1949, "the family had been the basic social unit and organizational form in rural China." Mao changed things radically into the commune system, where "all assets were taken away from households and managed as collective goods." Coase and Wang write of this as "an extreme form of socialist agricultural management where farming was organized by production teams..., with households treated as employees." It will surprise many readers that Mao had an "instinctive hostility toward centralization." There was "no private property or free market," but also "much less central planning than the name socialism might suggest." Although we are told that China received a fair amount of equipment from the Soviet bloc during the first Five Year P
{"title":"How China Became Capitalist","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-2176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-2176","url":null,"abstract":"How China Became Capitalist Ronald Coase and Ning Wang Palgrave Macmillan, 2013China's transition from Maoism to \"capitalism with Chinese characteristics\" is not only one of the principal facts about the global economy today, but is also a subject of great complexity and ambiguity. What is one to make of a society in which Adam Smith is revered while Marxism is still universally taught in the schools? In How China Became Capitalist, Ronald Coase, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, and Ning Wang, an assistant professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University, have joined in writing an extended essay on the history and economics of China since the Communists completed their victory over Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. It is clear from the book's title that they believe China has \"become capitalist,\" but it is apparent that there is much that is muddled about the transformation. There are many contradictory elements that go together to cook up a social and economic stew that is likely to bubble vigorously for quite a while before it develops any culinary coherence.The subject is of such importance that there is compelling reason for serious minds to read this book attentively. It is full of information new to any reader who isn't a China specialist. At the same time, it is for several reasons hard to recommend it to the general reader. It isn't difficult reading or full of technical information, but neither is it particularly engaging, as one might require of a \"good read.\" Even though the chapter titles suggest a chronological account, there is throughout the book a rather jumbled mixture of time elements, with much rehashing, as though the chapters were done as separate essays independently needing to cover and recover the same ground. The result is not an ordered chronology. We are reminded of Eric Hoffer's observation that many books' content could just as well be stated in a single article, attaining greater concision and clarity. More substantively, a telling criticism is that there is much that Coase and Wang don't explain or even inquire into, leaving many unanswered questions. We will have more to say about that later.Through most of the country's history before the Communist take-over in 1949, \"the family had been the basic social unit and organizational form in rural China.\" Mao changed things radically into the commune system, where \"all assets were taken away from households and managed as collective goods.\" Coase and Wang write of this as \"an extreme form of socialist agricultural management where farming was organized by production teams..., with households treated as employees.\" It will surprise many readers that Mao had an \"instinctive hostility toward centralization.\" There was \"no private property or free market,\" but also \"much less central planning than the name socialism might suggest.\" Although we are told that China received a fair amount of equipment from the Soviet bloc during the first Five Year P","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84983177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-01-01DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-41596-8_5
R. Kolb
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DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America Bryan Sykes Liveright Publishing, 2012The premise of the current book is highly intriguing - an attempt to identify the ancestral origins of the various peoples that inhabit present-day USA by genetic analysis - even though it ultimately fails to deliver the promised "genetic portrait of America" in that it largely ignores the Asian component, which is annually increasing in importance. The centerpiece comprises "chromosome portraits" of selected and supposedly representative individuals. A chromosome portrait involves probing autosomes (chromosome pairs excluding the sex chromosomes) for specific genes with single nucleotide polymorphisms that correspond to one of "three continental origins" (Asia, Africa and Europe).This is a book written for the layman who will find it interesting, but out of the whole book, about half is really worthwhile from the standpoint of general science. However, the layman will find that the process of using genes to uncover ancestry is described in easy to understand terms - it is to Sykes' credit that he uses simple language to describe concepts that someone with little background in genetics could understand. The author describes the genetic linkage between today's Native Americans and Asians through DNA analysis, thereby tying Native Americans to Asia. While Native Americans originated from outside the Americas and the author recites what is known about their prehistoric migration believed to be via the Bering Straits at a time when the ocean levels were much lower than today.The other half of the book however consists of recitation of oftenopinionated personal musings that may or may not have anything to do with genetics as the author travels across America in search of test subjects. Indeed, he includes photographs of himself and his colleagues snapped at different places along his route. Notwithstanding that the U.S. has nowhere near an efficient railway system as operates in Europe or Japan, the author chooses to travel by Amtrak and parts of the book consequently read like a travelogue. However, he also includes tables listing the genetic analyses of DNA procured during his tour.He carefully eschews use of the term race in relation to his research, by referring instead to haplogroups passed down intact through the generations. In short, much of his book is devoted to identifying genetic markers that distinguish between European, Asian and American Indian ancestry. Thus, he obtained DNA samples from a number of American born white entertainers, and found John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Sophia Loren, Grace Kelly, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy to be of purely European ancestry (p. 306). The DNA of Gregory Peck, by contrast, contained a genetic marker that indicated that one fairly remote ancestor had hailed from Africa. Orson Welles also had evidence of an African ancestor, while Dorothy Lamour's sample revealed traces of both African and Native American origin, although in
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Pub Date : 2013-07-01DOI: 10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim280020460
D. D. Murphey
After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work AheadAlan S. BlinderThe Penguin Press, 2013Books about the Great Recession have come along in a natural progression. A first wave consisted of those written during the early months of the crisis, and gave much detail about the debacle and its causes. The second wave came after passage of the bailout bill (TARP1) in late 2008 and the "stimulus package" (ARRA2) in early 2009. The authors of those books were able to tell much about the immediate responses to the crisis, though they necessarily felt the need to precede this by retelling what the first books had covered. Now, as the years pass and the monetary and fiscal responses to the calamity give way to longer-term efforts at "reform," a third wave of books will appear dealing with those later developments. But because each author sees his own contribution as not simply part of the flow, but as a "stand alone" explication that needs to be at least somewhat complete in itself, the books in this third wave will again go back over much of the ground covered by those in the first two and will thus devote only part of their attention to the reform phase.Alan Blinder's After the Music Stopped follows this pattern. It recapitulates the events of the crisis and its aftermath, but then goes into the later efforts at reform. A reader will find it significant that it is one of the early books in the third wave, and that for that reason it isn't able to spell out the reforms as accomplished fact. This is because most of the reforms are still on the drawing boards. The writing was finished in late 2012, and as of that time Blinder found it necessary to report that the Dodd-Frank Act, the U.S. Congress's massive financial reform statute in 2010,3 was "virtually never more than a skeleton" because "the sketchy... content... must be translated into concrete, detailed regulations by the agencies involved." Nonetheless, what the author is able to do is valuable. He provides nuanced discussion of a good many reform proposals, and provides excellent quick-reference tables which identify several issues, "key aspects of the debate" about each issue, what the U.S. Treasury Department's reform proposal contained, and what was (and was not) included in the Act itself. As the third wave continues, there will no doubt be a vast future literature analyzing the financial regulations that emerge from the agencies that Dodd-Frank put in place.In these pages, we have reviewed a number of books about the recent financial crisis written by eminent economists of various persuasions.4 Alan S. Blinder fits in well with that company. He served on President William Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, and from 1994 to 1996 was the vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. In addition to writing a monthly column for the Wall Street Journal, appearing in a variety of television discussions, and serving as vice chairman of a financial servi
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A World without Islam Graham E. Fuller Little, Brown and Company, 2010 The current book, with its provocative title, is likely to entice those who believe that the Christian West, with the United States as its vanguard, is locked with Islam in a life-and-death struggle, a "clash of civilizations". Current foreign policy is related to this premise and if Islam in general can be contained, and "radical" Islam in particular neutralized, then anti-western terrorism and current troubles in Muslim countries would disappear. However, author Graham Fuller argues that differences in doctrine between Islam and Christianity are not the primary sources of conflict and points out that other social forces would have engaged the West in conflict had there been no Islam. The world would still not be as conflict-free as those who image a world without Islam would like to believe. Fuller's main theme is that religion serves as a vehicle to further social and political ends of the ruling elite - and if a god is truly on our side, then so much the better. Like political institutions, Fuller notes, religions have spent a great deal of time "striving to preserve orthodoxy" and quashing dissent. Religious dogma reflects contemporaneous secular interests and like secular institutions, religions have evolved over time to accommodate changing social norms and ideology. Both theological flexibility and rigidity can be readily observed in Christianity as well as in Islam. It should not be surprising that ruling elites have closely linked religious institutions to secular institutions, to shape social behavior towards a desired end, rather than for the purpose of mass spiritual salvation or enlightenment. Such social engineering has had disastrous consequences for the non-believing segment of the population, particularly for "heathen" minorities. Religious institutions, of course, do not have a monopoly on evoking behavior that leads to mass atrocities, as modern secular states have demonstrated. Thus, a closer examination of "religious-based" violence will frequently reveal profound socio-political and possibly ethnic roots. Fuller states that there is little "serious analysis" of the consequences of US foreign policy actions. In fact, analysis tends to focus on "others" - "why do 'they' hate us" and "why can't 'they' accept America's values" and abandon their "negative intentions". This leads to policies that inflame instead of reduce anti-US hostility. Without actually speculating on what the world would be like without Islam, Fuller argues that other institutions would have come into conflict with the West had Islam not been established. The main value of this book is the historical narration, from the fragmentation of the Roman Empire, the conflict between different factions within Christianity, the rise of Islam within this environment and the experience of non-western regions that have come in contact with Islam. Rather than seeing them as mutually exclusive, Fuller p
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